A marketing campaign is a series of operations designed to attract customers to a product or service. Among the most common types of marketing operations are advertising and promotions. Advertising involves describing features and benefits of a product or service in a way that captures the attention of a target audience. Promotion involves keeping a product or service in the minds of a target audience in order to stimulate demand for the product or service. Advertising and promotions typically are carried out by carefully crafted materials, such as brochures, direct mail, flyers, written advertisements, and websites.
The goals of a marketing campaign depend on the overall business goals and strategies of the entity conducting the campaign. These goals typically are defined by specifying the target audience to be reached, the information to be conveyed to the target audience, how the information will be conveyed to the target audience, the monetary budget for the marketing campaign, the timeframe over which the marketing campaign should be conducted, and the desired results of the marketing campaign.
Clearly, one of the biggest challenges in producing a successful marketing campaign involves reaching or capturing the attention of the target audience. One of the most effective ways to reach a targeted audience is to design the marketing communications so that they are directly and personally relevant to the members of the targeted audience. This marketing approach commonly is referred to as “one-to-one marketing” or “loyalty marketing” or “customer relationship marketing”. The level of personalization in the marketing communications may vary from a non-customized (or static) mass-produced document that will be received by every member of the target audience to a fully customized document that is personalized with information that is highly relevant and custom-tailored to each person in the target audience, including the layout, the copy (i.e., textual content), and the images appearing in the marketing material. The return on investment in the marketing campaign typically increases with the level of personalization of the marketing communications; unfortunately, the overall costs of producing the marketing campaign also increase with the level of personalization.
Marketing campaigns typically are expensive to produce, especially when high-end marketing communications are required. For example, a typical direct mail marketing campaign involves obtaining marketing lists of members of a target audience, creating direct mail materials, distributing direct mail materials to the target audience, recovering responses to the direct mail materials, and analyzing the results. These tasks are repeated for each new marketing campaign, even when a new marketing campaign involves simply adapting a centrally produced marketing communication to a local market. The marketing campaign tasks typically are distributed to many people, including people, such as outside marketing professionals and graphic designers, who work outside of the business entity conducting the marketing campaign. The process of communicating with and coordinating the activities of these different people imposes significant monetary and time costs on the business entity conducting the marketing campaign. Indeed, such costs often are prohibitive for small and medium sized companies.
What is needed is an integrated marketing campaign production approach that allows persons who are not experts in marketing or graphic design to produce high-quality marketing communications for a marketing campaign in a way that is less expensive and resource-intensive than current high-end marketing approaches.